Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

The untold story of the doomed steamship's construction, revealing how 15,000 men toiled day and night in life-threatening conditions to create a state-of-the-art floating city. Based on original blueprints and unseen archives, cutting-edge special effects bring this process back to life on screen, and explore how the outsize ambitions that made it all possible also led to the ship's dramatic demise.

Could we get all our energy needs from sea water and the salt it contains? Are we to witness a time when salt will power our engines and factories, and light up our cities? Could this be the final curtain not only for shale gas and oil, but also the burning of fossil fuels and the beginning of a gentler form of energy that is definitely renewable? This documentary explores the latest research on sea water and the way scientists all over the world are working on 'Blue Energy'. This research could bring about a major change in our time.

Intimate interviews and life stories of several people involved in the life of an inmate condemned to death in a Texas prison. We do not know when and how we will die. Death Row inmates do. Werner Herzog embarks on a dialogue with Death Row inmates, asks questions about life and death and looks deep into these individuals, their stories, their crimes.

An in-depth voyage into the sci-fi film 'Alien' with the visionary filmmakers who created it. See how one of the most terrifying movies of all time came to life 40 years ago and the untold origin story behind Ridley Scott's movie.
It was rooted in Greek and Egyptian mythologies and in our universal fears, and the history was inspired by underground comics, the art of Francis Bacon, and the dark visions of Dan O'Bannon and H.R. Giger. The documentary is a contemplation on the symbiotic collaborative process of movie-making, the power of myth, and our collective unconscious.

Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists, the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider's web. It is part of a new field of research, synthetic biology, with a radical aim: to break down nature into spare parts so that we can rebuild it however we please. This technology is already being used to make bio-diesel to power cars. Other researchers are looking at how we might, one day, control human emotions by sending 'biological machines' into our brains.

In this episode, Helen seeks out the colours that turned planet Earth multicoloured. To investigate the essence of sunlight Helen travels to California to visit the largest solar telescope in the world. She discovers how the most vivid blue is formed from sulfur atoms deep within the Earth's crust and why the presence of red ochre is a key sign of life. In gold, she discovers why this most precious of metals shouldn't even exist on the surface of the planet and in white, Helen travels to one of the hottest places on Earth to explore the role salt and water played in shaping planet Earth.